Archive for March, 2008

Here’s the list of moments I’ve kept waffling on about in my essay and presentations. I use the word moment because I think the best way of looking at this history is to break it down in to a few snapshot moments. I don’t like the word moments that much but can’t think of anything better. I’m not saying these will defnitely be the ones I’ll use, but they’re what I’m looking at for the moment.

Here are a few points that should illustrate most of where my mind is with this…

1 – I think the words history, word and all are perhaps not quite equally important parts of my title but the first two shouldn’t be forgotten. I’d chosen them before I chose the word all, after all. I sometimes feel like I’m making a project about absolutely everything. I’m not. It’s about the history of a word. I want to look at the word’s use and misuse, with a view to examining language in the process. A significant part of this is looking at the images and ideas that flood into people’s minds when they hear the word. Which leads me on to part two of this post.

I’ve been chewing over what folks said at the group crit. One thing Andy said was that I should think about the opposite of all. Many people would say that would be none. I’ve talked about this a little bit in my first post for this blog, when talking about Derrida and the concept of the trace. You could easily say that none is included in all, because all is all. As none or nothing is an idea, it exists, and is part of all. That absence, that nothingness, is an entity of sorts, perhaps even without referring to its being an idea.